Archive for July 2008

For only the second time in the last 15 years, I’m clean shaven, at least between earlobes and lips. I shaved once before about eight years ago, give or take. Why did I do it? Beats me. I experiment when I’m alone.

Yes, I’m alone. Every living thing that weighs more than 30 pounds is wheeling his or her way to PEI for a week plus. It’s a family vacation, minus the most important part of the family, who has to stay in town to teach. Yeah, I’m broken up over the fact that I won’t be able to spend one eighth of my life in a minivan over the next eight days.

So I console myself with trips to Wal-Mart, where I bought cream, one pair of socks, a shower mirror that will probably lose its anti-fog coating in the next 20 minutes, Coke Zero, and a pair of shoes. I didn’t go with the intention of buying shoes, but I saw them on display and thought they looked cool. I wandered around for half an hour wondering if I should really buy them. I ran into a kid I coach in T-ball and his mom, and they liked the shoes so I bought them. I’m so impulsive.

Friday night, Elvi and I spent a night out with Tania (a friend from Rice) and her husband while Child 1 babysat their kids in their hotel. We had a good time, a nice combination of reminiscing, parent chat, and whatever else. I lost track after the second Coco Beach (something with Blue Curacao and Bacardi Coco).

After shopping, I was all set for another rousing not at home alone (technically, with a guinea pig, a rabbit, four chinchillas, and assorted party-crashing vermin) when Tania called and invited me out again. It’s like the entire universe conspired to present me with the opportunity to buy shoes and wear them out – with new socks, no less. So I did. We hung out in the hotel bar and – maybe it was the mojito – we talked for another three hours. And Tania thinks I’m social and outgoing. Maybe I used to be…. She liked the shoes and said my clean-shavedness made me look more conservative but had no more comment because I was clean shaven back when she knew me in university. She’s also pushing me to grow my hair long, like it was back then, too. Ironically, her hair is now long – in school, she kept it nearly buzz-cut short.

I’ve written before about my introduction to Rice at the hands of a student who’d later appear in Playboy. There were two Rice students in that issue – the other was Tania’s roommate.

Bonus question for the Singularity:

Does anyone know how to create a mail filter in Gmail that would automatically route some message to the inbox? Gmail classifies all the comment notifications for this blog as spam. I can “star” the messages and assign them labels, but all that gets me is starred, labelled messages in my spam folder. there seems to be no way to get Gmail to put it in the inbox, although I can get Gmail to archive it.

“We couldn’t just send him back to Denmark. It’s actually a little shameful, there’s nothing human behind this. That’s just the way it is when everything hinges on a bunch of paper,” said a harbour worker who wished to remain anonymous.